Transforming Pension Statements with Personalised Video

How behavioural design helped Aegon turn pension statements into an engaging digital experience

The Challenge

Engaging customers with their pensions is a persistent challenge in the UK workplace savings market.

Many employees are automatically enrolled into workplace pension schemes without actively choosing to join. As a result, they often feel disconnected from their retirement savings.

At Aegon, fewer than 5% of customers reviewed their pension online each year, and traditional annual statements were frequently ignored.

These documents were typically long, technical and difficult to interpret. As a result, customers often delayed decisions or failed to engage with their retirement savings altogether. The challenge was:

How can pension information be presented in a way that captures attention, simplifies complexity and motivates customers to take action?

Our approach

Cowry partnered with Aegon to redesign the pension statement experience using behavioural science. Rather than simply improving the existing document, we created a fully personalised video experience that turned each customer’s pension data into an engaging narrative.

The video used behavioural science principles to:

• increase attention and emotional engagement
• simplify complex financial information
• motivate customers to take meaningful actions

Each video was personalised based on the customer’s age, investment holdings and pension value, creating a highly relevant experience.

Behavioural insight

Our research identified three behavioural dynamics that could significantly improve engagement.

The solution

Cowry partnered with Idomoo, a leader in personalised video technology, to create a dynamic and behaviourally optimised pension experience.

Together, we transformed traditional pension statements into personalised video summaries, combining behavioural science with customer-specific pension data to create an engaging and actionable experience.

Each video was dynamically generated using the customer’s own pension data, including:

• age
• investment holdings
• pension value

This allowed every viewer to receive a unique, personalised narrative explaining their retirement progress and highlighting the actions they could take next.

Cowry applied behavioural design principles to shape the experience, including:

• Emotional priming – Subtle birdsong audio was used at the beginning of the video to create a calm cognitive state, helping viewers process financial information more effectively.
• Visual progress cues – The pension pot was animated to grow in size as contributions increased, reinforcing progress through size congruency and the goal gradient effect.
• First-person immersion – The video used a first-person perspective, inspired by gaming design, allowing customers to experience their pension journey from their own viewpoint.

The experience concluded by zooming out to show the viewer’s hands interacting with the Aegon website, guiding them directly toward the next action.

Impact:

The personalised video summaries produced strong engagement among previously disengaged customers. These behaviours represent meaningful steps toward improving customers’ long-term financial outcomes.